As part of The Drum’s latest Focus, where we are turning our attention to the ever-evolving entertainment industry, we revisit the World Creative Rankings to find out which campaigns from the sector were the most awarded last year.
Recently, we have been revealing the world’s most-awarded advertisers, agencies, people and campaigns. This week, to coincide with The Drum’s Entertainment Focus, we dig into the campaigns list once more, spotlighting work from the entertainment industry that picked up the most gongs at 2023’s award shows.
Taking the top spot is BBDO Toronto’s ‘Missing Matoaka’ for magazine brand Muskrat. Addressing an Amnesty International stat that shows sexual stereotypes to be a major factor in violent attacks towards Indigenous women and girls, who are 16 times more likely to be murdered than any other group, the agency created a full-length alternative audio track for Disney’s Pocahontas, written and recorded by Indigenous writers, that synced with every syllable in the film and corrected the stereotypes and inaccuracies portrayed in it.
The second-most-awarded campaign in 2023 was VML Mexico’s ‘Shout,’ a boxing film for Spanish and Hispanic American telecommunications giant Movistar that tackled homophobia in Mexico – in particular, the cyberbullying of gay people – through a film that turns the notion of machismo on its head.
Third-most-awarded, meanwhile, was Penguin Random House’s ‘The Unburnable Book’ by Rethink, which was also the most-awarded agency in the world in 2023. The project, which also won the Grand Prix and Physical Product Design awards at The Drum Awards for Design, came in reaction to a sudden uptick in the prohibition of books within the American school system in 2022 and saw the Canadian agency produce a flame-resistant copy of Margaret Atwood’s bestselling classic The Handmaid’s Tale, which has been one of the most commonly banned books in the United States since its publication in 1985. To promote the project, Rethink filmed a particularly mischievous-looking Atwood donning a pair of thick gloves and firing a flame-thrower at the unburnable book.
The World Creative Rankings are compiled by exhaustively analyzing the performance of thousands of pieces of creative work across 22 major industry awards programs throughout the previous calendar year.
That data is then used to determine the people rankings – the CCOs, ECDs, creative directors, art directors and copywriters responsible for the most creatively awarded work in 2023. Their companies are then ranked, with these rankings including the best agencies, networks and holding companies, which are then split by country and region. The advertisers who fund the world’s most awarded work are also ranked, while the sectors that offer the richest return in creative gongs, whether that be Food & Drink, Automotive, Retail or Charity, are also evaluated.
Head over to our dedicated World Creative Rankings hub to see the full list of most-awarded entertainment campaigns in the world, plus all of our other tables and breakdowns, as well as full details of the methodology that goes into the production of the rankings.
